Notes on Startup Engineering Management for Young Bloods
Link: https://www.elidedbranches.com/2015/10/notes-on-startup-engineering-management.html
- Managing people at startups is different because you have no safety net
- There are no systems in place that set you up for success (processes, rules, career ladders, salary bands)
- Creating the safety net is part of your job. Create sane processes, standards, values.
- Coordination is very hard
- It is helpful to get at least some shared vocabulary across teams for collaboration
- There is a lot of overhead involved in managing coordination of people (we invented microservices so we hand't had to deal with the coordination of teams)
- If the set of projects going on can fit into your head, your project list is probably trivial
- If the set of people is small enough that everyone knows everyone else, politics is trivial
- If you have politics in a startup, it's usually a sign of organizational illness or lack of cultural unity
- The sooner you realize what values your company truly holds, the easier avoiding these types of problems will be
- “The team is moving too slow” is the hardest problem you’ll ever debug
- Metrics are not the only way to get your job done, but they can be useful
- Learn to estimate your capacity, and your team's capacity
- When you aren't finishing important things, it is a sign that you need to either delegate or simply STOP DOING SOMETHING. That something you need to stop doing is often writing code
- You must figure out how to get information about the bottlenecks and problems in the development process without actually having to do it all yourself
- Prepare for long feedback loops, and look for opportunities to shorten them
- A lot of things you start implementing will only result in feedback weeks or months (or years) after you took the decision
- Feedback loops should be as short as possible and you should put effort into making them shorter whenever possible
- People can do more than they think they can
- Some people don't need pushes to perform their best, some do
- People will quit
- Sometimes its because of you, sometimes you could not have done anything to prevent it and did not play a role in it
- Accept it as a fact of life
- Your job is to survive
- One step after another. Be open minded, learn.